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Scott Cleveland

BPM & Customer Expectations

"To achieve sustainable growth and profitability requires new thinking and new actions. Businesses must empower employees at all levels of the organization to act in direct alignment with strategy, where that strategy enables the meeting of customer expectations - without exception. There are a few companies that have done this, but the cost has been high and the challenge daunting. Now there is clear guidance on how to deliver success without exception in any organization of any size and in any market. Some will choose to adopt new techniques and achieve new levels of success in their business; others won't.

Business success will be won by those who take innovative action to create customer success as a natural by-product of the activities of everyone in the organization. Strategy can no longer be implied in functional directives of the business; it must be explicit in the actions the people in the organization take to meet customer expectations on a daily basis."

There have been a great deal of discussions about documenting the 'as-is' process recently. Often, when thinking about process improvements, the customer gets left out.

A decade ago, we talked about having happy customers. Today, we need to be talking about ecstatic customers. Happy customers have been known to change suppliers. An ecstatic customer, however, is one that would never change suppliers and they would tell their friends to do business with you.

No matter your path to improving your processes, your customer 'touch points' are extremely important. Work with your customers to make life easier for them. Work with your customers to make it easy for them to buy from you. Look for innovative ways to create customer success.

2 Comments

What you refer to as ecstatic versus happy is a fundamental principle of Net Promoter Score, a measure used extensively at one of the World's best customer service companies, USAA. Ecstatic customers proactively recommend your company, happy customers are actually neutral, because happy only means you've met expectations.

Without a focus on customer ecstasy, 'good enough' quickly takes over, and customers migrate elsewhere. I think about the hurdle any other company faces in trying to lure me away from USAA, and it is very, very high. That says it all.

thanks for posting, it inspires the thought-provoking brainstorm about both BPM management and board governance in this post-recession era:

1. Why is the board not interested in BPM today:
The board is interested in strategy setting, risk control, and talent management, all business related discipline; but the stage of BPM today is more about: micro-process automation, document management., etc.

2. How to make the board think BPM as strategic imperative, GRC improvement or even talent hot bed,?
The next generation of BPM should focus on business transformation such as digitization, globalization., cloudification., etc, these are top prioritized strategy for any organization now, the matured BPM effort could optimized GRC, embedded risk control and governance into fiber of information system more seamlessly. Last, but not least, BPM is beyond the application project, it has the whole-organizational scope and scale, even cross the organizational border, it may become the hotbed to train the talent with holistic point of view and out-of-box thinking mindset

BPM & Boardroom interaction could acceleration BPM's maturity, plus take the governance into the next level.

Scott Cleveland

Scott Cleveland is a technical, innovative and creative marketing manager with more than 25 years of experience in marketing, marketing management, sales, sales management and business process consulting aimed at high-tech companies.
His areas of expertise include: product marketing, solutions marketing, solution selling, sales maangement, business process management, business process improvement and process optimization. Reach him at RScottCleveland[at]gmail.com.